How to Make Ground Beef Tacos

Learn how to make ground beef tacos from Brooklyn Taco Co. chef/owner Jesse Kramer in this Howcast video.

Transcript

I am here to tell you how to make my guilty pleasure, ground beef tacos. This is very dependent on your spice blend because the beef itself is going ton be a little mild.

We have onions, garlic, we're going to sweat that. Tomatoes, sweat it. And then we have a nice little custom spice blend that I have here. Smoked paprika, onion powder, cumin, coriander, marjoram, it is all there. It is going to bring a little bit of bright flavors, dark flavors, smoky flavors, and then obviously jalapenos to give it a little kick.

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So here we have my pan, nice and warm. We're going to add oil. We're going to basically sweat these veggies for about five, six minutes. Woo, yeah amazing. That really brings a lot of the flavor out. Tomatoes. Salt obviously. I don't know how many times I can tell you how important salt it.

And then jalapenos. Cook off a little bit of the sharp flavor in that. All right, so we're going to turn that on low. Add a little more salt. Now, ground beef is a little stubborn. It's mild in flavor so you really need to add the right amount of spice or it's going to just fall short and we don't allow that in our kitchen. We want it to be flavored inside and out. So here's the spice blend, it's going in here and you can, again add more if you want, take it out but I promise you this is going to be good.

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So we're just going to mix that up. Nice even mix. You can use an 80 20 blend of meat. If you use any higher fats it's just going to melt into the pan, which is not a bad thing. Fat is an amazing ingredient. Oh yeah, so nice.

So that's going to cook for like probably 10, 15 minutes. It's going to take a little whole for the water to be pulled out of the beef and for the fat to reduce so you have a nice useable product. So we're just going to mix that up. Keep it stirring.

So after about 15 minutes you'll see that the beef will probably be half the size here, which is alright because we want to get rid of that water because that water is preventing the flavor from really shining. It's diluting it right now but we're going to cook it down, concentrate that flavor and you're going to have an amazing ground beef taco and as much as you want to use a hard shell, don't do it. Use the soft corn tortillas. It's so much better, it's so much more fresh. It'll stay together.

We are now ready to finish and assemble the ground beef taco. So, here we are. We have the ground beef. It is cooked down. All the flavor is right alive and in front of you. We have a hot tortilla pan going here. Fresh tortillas. Fresh lettuce. Mexican sour cream. Limes. Fresh sliced avocados. Cilantro. Little bit of salt if we need it. Because we like salt.

So here we are. Pan hot. Going to put it down here. Going to give it about 30 seconds. I have two tortillas in this pan cooking right now because one is never enough. You don't want it to break apart because then your taco ends up in your plate, not in your stomach.

So, here we are. Just finishing up. I'm going to transfer this to the plate, nice and hot and steamy. Have my ground beef, oh look at that, so nice. Steaming. You'll see the mixture of onions, and peppers, and garlic and you'll smell and taste the spices. Awesome.

Remember not to overfill your taco because it makes it harder to eat. Creamy flavor. Awesome. Lettuce. Beautiful. Little bit of cilantro for freshness, always. Awesome. Lay it on there. Can never have enough avocado, it's a healthy fat. Lime. So ready to eat this. And I don't mind if I do. Mm-hm. Baller status right here. That's how you make a beef taco.